


That Kind of Grateful

by Siamesa



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Much more fluff than angst, Newly established relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:08:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22136827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: Keith is always up for cuddling with Shiro.It's the snowstorm, knee injury, and threat of death by undead alien that are causing the problems.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 89





	That Kind of Grateful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThatScottishShipper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatScottishShipper/gifts).



> Finally got my Sheith Secret Santa fic up, for Loomy (hope I got your Ao3 account right!)
> 
> Set in a barely-alternate early S7. Title from Vienna Teng's "The Last Snowfall." Happy holidays, and enjoy!

Routine mission. As if they’ve ever had a routine mission.

The Lions are still dangerously low on power, the team is getting dangerously low on food, and _Keith_ is dangerously low on patience. So far, this iceball of an abandoned colony hasn’t been helping with any of it.

They’ve split into teams – Pidge and Hunk with the Lions, the rest on two person scouting parties. Most of them are in the ruins of the nearest city, though Krolia has taken his space wolf hunting for _whatever_ might spend the winter aboveground. He’s taken Shiro into the mountains.

The end goal, when they started climbing, was a metal spar Allura had insisted looked like a communications tower. Keith’s gotten a better look at it now, and his end goal has changed to kissing Shiro awhile on top of a mountain before heading back down to help with the hunting.

He’d formed a _plan._ That, he thinks as a rock gives way, had been his first mistake.

They slide down a long slope of scree, Keith grabbing desperately for Shiro. He overbalances in an instant, knee coming down heavily against something sharp.

Pain. Barely pain. Shiro bellows something that sounds like his name before vanishing amidst the dust and snow.

The slope gives way, and Keith falls.

-

“Keith!”

Something has ahold of his shoulder. Shaking him, gently, like the space wolf getting used to his jaws.

He wrenches his eyes open, and his heart thuds with relief. _Shiro._

There’s a bruise on his face, and a few rips in his coat. The empty sleeve is a tattered mess, fallen out of its neat knot, and Keith reaches for Shiro’s bad shoulder before he can stop himself. 

_My fault._

“Hey,” says Shiro. “Don’t move.”

“’m fine,” he says, automatically. His ribs throb in protest, and the fall did nothing for his injured knee. There’s blood beneath the rip in his jumpsuit, and the shape of it isn’t quite right either. Keith jerks his gaze away.

It looks like they’ve fallen into more of the ruins – arches of the same purplish stone hold up what remains of the ceiling, and there’s something hard and level beneath the thin layer of snow on the ground. Everything else is covered in ice and snowdrifts, but some of the shapes could be statues, and a few are too regular to be anything but purposefully made.

His first thought is _coffins_ , and his second is _of course they are._ This whole planet is a tomb, and they’ve still managed to find a real one, _and_ get injured, _and_ there’s a not insignificant chance of freezing to death.

Some Black Paladin he is.

He reaches for Black in his mind, all the same, and gets only a dim starfield in response. Either too far or still conserving power.

 _Shiro’s here,_ he tries to impress across the bond. _Shiro needs help –_

Shiro touches his calf. “That… doesn’t look good.”

“I’ve had worse,” says Keith, before he can stop himself. Of course he has. But from the look on Shiro’s face, Keith can tell exactly which _worse_ he’s thinking of.

Fuck.

He leans forward, flinging an arm over Shiro’s shoulders. Shiro tenses beneath it, but he’s had practice with that.

Well, a week of practice. It still ought to count for something.

“C’mere.”

Shiro leans into him. He’s at an awkward angle, keeping away from Keith’s injured knee, hand against the ice to balance himself.

His glove is ripped. Keith reaches for it, readjusts them, until he has Shiro’s only remaining hand – don’t think about it, don’t go back there – cradled between both of his and hopefully in less danger of frostbite.

They lean up against one of the coffins.

“You remember Garrison survival training?” asks Shiro after a moment.

Keith remembers sneaking away from twelve useless cadets to go catch a rattlesnake. “It was crap.” 

Shiro snorts, and a glow fills Keith’s chest in spite of the cold. “The idea is body heat. If we had a blanket, we’d want to be shirtless.”

Keith looses one hand from Shiro’s to tighten it around his back. “I’m game if you are.” He gives a mental fistpump. Score one for a week of practice!

Shiro’s face softens.

And then Keith remembers. He jerks away from Shiro to scrabble through what passes for the pockets of his suit.

“Keith?”

“I should have – no, fuck, that one’s ruined – found it!” The Altean survival packet flashes blue in the light. Two screws, a pen, and his second-best knife-polishing cloth fall to the ground behind it. Keith ignores them, drawing his blade and slicing into the packet.

The force of escaping air sends him skidding back onto Shiro.

“How old are those, again?”

There’s a _laugh_ in Shiro’s voice, his “bad-jokes-in-the-face-of-despair” laugh but a laugh all the same. Keith would take a few more pratfalls for that. 

“That depends.”

“Oh?” And now Shiro’s smiling, actually smiling. Keith can count on one hand the smiles he’s seen since Shiro woke up in this body – the real ones, not the fake ones he gives the team still hoping he’ll have all the answers.

Maybe this one’s fake too, maybe it’s just to comfort Keith, but Shiro’s eyes are sparkling, and the cold and the pain in his knee are distant, irrelevant things. Shiro’s _Shiro._

Shiro’s _here._

“On whether these are from Allura’s stash, or Coran’s.” 

Shiro nods. Keith, with tremendous force of will, levers himself off Shiro’s lap and heads over to investigate the contents of the survival kit.

A few of what he guesses are Altean energy bars – one of which had knocked the arm off a statue with the force of its flight – a packet that might have once held liquid, but certainly doesn’t now, a flashlight that would have come in handy had it worked, five of what he’s going to hope are chemical handwarmers, and the culprit in the packet explosion: an emergency blanket. Not the thin, silvery kind in Garrison kits, but a massive, padded, _lavender_ thing that had inflated with the force of a small grenade.

He drags it over to Shiro triumphantly.

They huddle together again, backs against the coffin. Keith unzips Shiro’s jumpsuit, trying to preempt the moment when Shiro fumbles with his missing arm and starts mistaking help for pity. 

Maybe they’re beyond that, but Keith isn’t sure. He remembers how long it took _him,_ every kind gesture feeling like mockery. 

And it had always been Shiro doing the helping, Shiro surviving in spite of everything the world threw at him. Keith would hand him back the Black Lion in an instant, but he knows it won’t work that way. He’s the Black Paladin now, irrevocably, and _that’s_ a scarier thought than freezing to death in an alien tomb.

“You okay?”

Keith twists his head and looks up. He’s still getting used to the white hair – the white _eyebrows –_ but the solid back against him doesn’t feel like something he’s only had for a week.

This is where he’s meant to be.

“Yeah. You?”

Shiro’s eyes slide away. “…Been better.” There’s a hint of – maybe an attempt at – one of his old self-deprecating laughs. Keith remembers scrambling up the side of an alien ravine, Shiro’s black one-liners echoing in his ears.

 _Been better._ That’s about as close as Shiro’s willing to come to _everything’s fucked,_ and even after all their time apart, Keith knows him well enough to hear what’s beneath the words. 

He shifts, until they’re chest to chest, wraps his arms around Shiro’s ribs. His knee sends up a sharp stab of pain at the motion, and he buries his wince in Shiro’s neck.

He can’t quite bury the hitch in his breath, though, and Shiro, instead of tightening his arm around him, lifts the blanket.

“…That doesn’t look good,” he says, as Keith presses his face into his shoulder and weighs the odds of distracting him with a kiss. His knee is fine.

“It’s either broken or dislocated, Keith. It’s purple. It’s not _fine.”_

The cold must be getting to him worse than he thought, if he hadn’t realized he was speaking out loud – or maybe Shiro’s just gotten good at reading his mind.

“’m Galra,” mumbles Keith into Shiro’s skin. “Galra are supposed to be purple.”

That _does_ get a bit of a snort out of Shiro, at least. He lowers the blanket, wrapping his arm back around Keith. 

The first Altean-handwarmer- _thing_ doesn’t work. _Too old._ Neither does the second. On his third try, he finally has a working heat source to nestle between them, though there’s no guessing how long it’ll last. The cold ought to numb his knee, at least.

Keith strokes Shiro’s back, as best he can without bruising his knuckles on the coffin. Shiro shivers under it, and pulls him in tighter. He wonders, not for the first time, how long their time apart felt to Shiro, trapped inside of Black’s mind. Hours or centuries? How much could he see, how much could he feel?

It terrifies him, in a way no battle ever has.

If he’d stayed, if he’d fought harder, if he’d _noticed –_

Shiro had leant up out of that coma and kissed him. Keith has barely let him out of his sight since, but he thinks even if they weren’t sleeping together, they’d still be spending their nights in the same bed. Just _touching._ Keith’s head on Shiro’s chest, reminding them both that they’re alive.

He can feel that heartbeat now, against his own. If they have to die here – and they’re not going to die here, he is going to haunt the fuck out of his team if they die here – at least they’re meeting it side by side.

“You’re grinding your teeth.”

Keith makes an effort to unclench his jaw, then, as his teeth begin to chatter, clenches it right back. “Just wondering where the team is.” His feet are going numb. His knee seems to be doing the opposite. His fingers brush against a spot on Shiro’s back that makes him flinch and swallow a small noise, and not in the way he’d prefer. “’Cause they’d better get here _soon._ ”

Shiro strokes the nape of his neck, soothingly. It would have been more reassuring before he’d figured out that Shiro was injured. Keith still finds himself leaning back into it, wondering if he’s Galra enough to purr.

The handwarmer gives out. Keith fumbles with another dud, his fingers stiff even through his gloves. The last one catches, thank fuck, and he and Shiro clutch it between them, hands tangled together. The light is fading, and under the blanket, Keith knows his eyes have gone Galra, trying to gather up the last of it.

“I’m taking you to a better planet next time,” he tells Shiro.

He can barely see the tilt of Shiro’s smile. “It’s a date.”

He’s grinning like an idiot at that, he knows he is, cheeks smarting in the cold, and so he swallows it up by kissing Shiro. He’s a grown man, they’ve been together for weeks, Romelle thinks they’re _married_ \- he doesn’t need to blush and stammer like he’s just been asked to the prom.

“With beaches,” says Keith. “And sunlight.”

“Fewer coffins.”

Keith actually laughs, nearly dislodging the blanket. “Fewer dead –“

A coffin lid thuds to the ground.

 _Fewer_ undead _aliens, maybe,_ thinks Keith, unlacing stiff fingers from Shiro’s and going for his blade. _Fuck._

Something wet and cold presses into his back, and Keith will deny his ensuing shriek until his dying day.

“Kosmo!” says Shiro, in a suspiciously choked voice.

“Don’t call him that.” Keith runs a hand through the space wolf’s ruff, and he rolls over on his belly, dislodging the blanket entirely in the process. 

“Good boy,” says Shiro. Kosmo lolls out his tongue.

Keith tries to pull Shiro to his feet, which ends with Shiro half-carrying him, keeping his bad leg off the ground. They gather up what bits of the survival kit they can under the circumstances, and then Keith leans into his boyfriend’s shoulder, waiting for the space wolf to decide there are no more belly rubs on offer and stand.

Keith takes ahold of his ruff. “Thanks for finding us.”

Kosmo gives a single, dignified tail wag in response.

With a snap of air, they’re back between Black’s paws.

Keith sags in relief. His knee throbs, and Shiro’s supporting most of his weight.

But he’s alive. Shiro’s alive.

Pidge leans down from Green and gives them an upside-down wave. “Oh, good, you’re back. Romelle found mushrooms.”

Mushrooms, a bad knee, whatever’s wrong with Shiro’s back – and a few hours quiet quality time with his boyfriend.

_(“It’s a date,” says Shiro)_

So, fine. Keith’s been to worse planets. 

He’s still never coming back to this one.


End file.
